Work Text:
The feeling sits with him all night. It's unwelcome company to the quiet of his apartment and the smell of drying ink – Shen Wei almost wants to open a window, let in the cool mid-spring air to chase the feeling away.
Zhao Yunlan has touched him before – a casual hand clasping his arm, the nudge of a shoulder—but never the human-warm brand of fingers on Shen Wei's bare skin. His wrist burns with it. It's a different feeling from Kunlun's touch, and Shen Wei would blame the test of time, for remembering incorrectly, but those touches had seared too deeply into his skin to be forgotten. Hadn't they?
(Kunlun's hands had been hot enough to burn away the nerve endings before Shen Wei could register the pain, hadn't they? In the years since waking in modern Haixing, he's been cold to every casual affection, any shaken hand or friendly nudge, gone out of his way to avoid the feeling of another's open palms. Why would Zhao Yunlan's touch now uncauterize skin that's long since gone numb.)
Is something wrong with him, to not savor a touch from Zhao Yunlan? A man not yet but soon to be Kunlun, with the same hands, the same smile, the same sharp mischief—his touch is the same but not. Has Shen Wei just forgotten, then, what it's like to be touched at all?
So it must be him, must be Shen Wei himself, who has changed. It must be him and his kindling-thin skin. The steady pressure at the back of his throat tastes like trepidation, or maybe true anxiety, that warns him of his impending combustion; Shen Wei will catch fire whether he keeps his distance or not, if only for the inevitability that is Zhao Yunlan getting his way. The inevitability that is Shen Wei letting him.
He sighs and rubs once more at his wrist. Maybe he should open the window, after all.